2014: The year the Americans broke the internet | Hacker News Reader

2014: The year the Americans broke the internet

thedrum.com

77 pointsyiedyie53 comments

There have always been multinets even if it seemed like one over-arching Internet, but users and technology are just going to have to become more sophisticated. Some good folks will be lost along the way to criminals and "intelligence services" (but I repeat myself!) We can't give up the dream and that remarkable goal of networked computing and communication and information accessibility.

It took some time but the assholes got their shit together. Which is what we're seeing now. These assholes have always been with us throughout human history, causing problems and violence and bringing out the worst in the rest of us.

So we need to maintain vigilance, and work early to undo their harm they cause to us and themselves. I forgive them, because they are born with hearts of fear and that will never change. We can't allow them to dictate our lives though. We know what's right and what's wrong, and we simply need to make sure they are put in the sandbox to play with their toys where they can't hurt anyone else while we move forward together as a family.

This is why no one individual should have too much power over anyone else, and no office or government should be similarly afforded the powers to destroy on a whim. There will always be these folks with us, and if we offer them opportunities to express themselves, they will to our shame and regret.

(I know, lots of "theys" and "us." I invite you to take a chance and perhaps expand your mind.)

> I forgive them, because they are born with hearts of fear and that will never change

I think it's not 'hearts of fear' but 'laserlike focus on maximizing shareholder value, greater good be damned.'

I think that comes from a place of fear in a lot of people. Money is power, and protection. What does money ultimately buy us if not safety? Perhaps not always literal physical safety, but the safety of knowing you can live life as you see fit without restriction.

Basically, money buys contentedness, and those that remain bound to contentedness are often there through the avoidance of the things that cause them fear.

I fail to see how this breaks even the US Internet. Comcast will never cut off the flow to certain parts of the Internet for the sake of charging you to go there. They'll always let you go to those places, they just won't let you go there as quickly if you don't pay extra.

I don't think I have to tell you all how shitty this would be, but it's not a "broken" Internet. We can sit here and concoct all kinds of worst-case scenarios, but we could also do that with anything. Your babysitter could feed your kid a bottle of aspirin - this is within the realm of physical possibility, just as it's within the realm of physical possibility that Comcast starts shaking down websites.

And before anyone even brings it up, Netflix and Comcast's peering agreement has nothing to do with net neutrality. Without peering, Netflix's path to consumers was long. With peering, it's not, which leads to faster speeds. That's it. Peering agreements have existed for many years, and will need to continue to exist for the Internet to continue to exist. It'd be much worse for the Internet to abolish all peering agreements in the name of neutrality (wtf?) than it would be for the FCC to have no teeth in enforcing net neutrality.

And if that's true, is it really much different than what we have today? If you have deep pockets, you can already buy speed by using the services of a CDN like Akamai. We already have an unlevel playing field.

Right now Comcast (except for torrent traffic, fuck them for that) doesn't meddle in what the packet is or where it's going, per se. However they do, apparently, have peering agreements with companies which allow these companies to serve traffic directly from THEIR networks, straight into Comcast's networks. This effectively does favor certain traffic over other traffic, but it's a kind of favoring that's been going on forever, and is generally accepted.

I dunno. I actually fail to see how peering in general is not a violation of net neutrality, however it's so critical to the smooth operation of the Internet, I'd rather have peering than net neutrality, if I had to choose.

If deliberately congesting links to encourage another company (who happens to be a competitor) to negotiate peering is not a violation of net neutrality then we need to update the definition.

Their peering agreement lapsed, that's all.

Nothing "deliberate" about slowing Netflix down, that's just what happens when packets have to travel further and through the greater Internet.

Put the pitchfork away.

Since when does an ISP negotiate peering agreements? It seems like a conflict of interest there, when Comcast's trunk business is actively thwarting the internet delivery service part of the business.

It's like McDonalds charging their suppliers because they're 'sending a lot of product into our kitchens.'

A McDonalds analogy makes a certain amount of sense, but to make it work, McDonalds would have to be paying nothing to start with for their supplies. Then, the discounts McDonalds does get for buying in such high volume could be seen as "charging their suppliers".

Normally, Comcast doesn't pay anyone to be able to serve their network traffic, so in that way they're like a McDonalds who doesn't pay for their supplies, and only acts as a middleman to give their suppliers a way to sell their buns or fries or whatever.

So yes, I think you have the right idea.

Also, ISPs have been peering both with one another and with others since the dawn of ISPs, as far as I can tell. Frankly, it is unfair, but it's been happening since the beginning. I don't honestly know how one would solve this imbalance - perhaps require ISPs to accept ALL peering requests? I don't know enough about networking to know if that would end well, but I suspect it wouldn't.

> Since when does an ISP negotiate peering agreements?

Since "forever"? When I ran an ISP in '95, peering was pretty much top of the agenda from day one given that bandwidth is such a huge cost centre. The only reason we never tried to charge site providers for peering was that we didn't get large enough before we sold our dial up customers.

> It's like McDonalds charging their suppliers because they're 'sending a lot of product into our kitchens.'

That's a horrible analogy. Comcast is not selling the chicken, they're selling access to the local roads that gets you to the freeways that can get you to the McDonalds, or any other business. Comcasts customers are not paying for a specific level of access to McDonalds.

But since you're using that kind of analogy, many suppliers pay for shelf positions in large super market chains, for the same reasons site site operators sometimes pay ISPs for more direct access: both sides know who is most dependent on the improved access.

Whose peering agreement with whom lapsed? AFAIK Comcast and Cogent never peered.

I'm having a hard time finding an unbiased source. I don't know the precise prior state of affairs between Comcast and Netflix's content providers. I know Cogent has been causing problems with Verizon over this same issue back in June/July.

I find it hard to believe Cogent had no peering agreement with Comcast, however, prior to 2014.

This is almost certainly deliberate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandvine#Comcast_controversy

Any U.S. decision on net neutrality can only affect the part of the internet that's within the U.S., so outside the U.S., the internet remains as it always was. I'm surprised that the author, writing from the U.K., thinks of "the internet" in such a U.S.-centric way. Did the Great Firewall of China also "break the internet"?

for people in China? In a manner of speaking: Yes.

Note that I've seen VOIP latency increase in the wake of a cable-company deploying a phone option. Disguising the nature of the traffic caused the latency to drop again.

How do you disguise the nature of the traffic without also changing the route taken by the packets?

I would be inclined to test this with/without a VPN connection, but then I wouldn't know whether the improvement was due to avoiding throttling/whatever, or just that my VPN server has better quality routes to the VoIP endpoint.

I guess if you VPN to the VoIP server itself, then it would be a fair test.

All RTP seemed to exhibit the issue, so we just setup a test with two RTP endpoints. We wrote a very simple UDP mangler/demangler (XOR with a fixed key) and ran it on both ends of the RTP connection.

I've said this in a different argument, but it bears repeating: The "internet" is merely a software abstraction. It doesn't exist. What actually exists is a loosely-coordinated group of private networks, subject to the whims of the owners of those networks. Nobody "broke" the internet, because there was nothing to break. All that's happening is that the abstraction is becoming less representative of the reality, for various quite predictable reasons.

You speak only of the letter and not of the spirit of the thing. This has nothing in common with the mentality that created the internet in the first place, which was cosmic and adventurous and poetic.

It reminds me rather of cutting the perforations off of postage stamps. I doubt that J.C.R. Licklider would approve.

Undoubtedly there are lots of high-minded poetic idealists behind the development of the internet. But the universe doesn't owe it to them to make the physical nature of the world adapt to their ideals. Maybe many people imagined that the internet would be this borderless space in the ether where packets flowed unimpeded from any source to any destination. Yet, borders are one of the most fundamental facets of earthly existence, and whoever controls them, whether they be nations or network providers, have tremendous power. And that is the true nature of reality.

"True nature of reality"? Highly debatable! Maybe in legal offices. :)

Everybody sees that concept through their own filter. I suppose to a cobbler the true nature of reality is surfaces that wear out over time.

Try walking all over your neighbor's lawn and get back to me about whether borders are a concept everyone sees through their own filter.

Depends on the neighbor.

In any case, filters that happen to be shared don't thereby become the "true nature of reality".

Borders are not a mental concept. They are empirically verifiable things (testable by walking across one and dodging the resulting bullets). The fact that you don't believe in them doesn't make them go away.

Bullets do not fire themselves, and the person who does so is acting on a mental concept.

internet abstract, borders reality. got it.

"The Year Multinational Corporations with Powers Beyond the Scope of Individual Actors Broke the Internet" just isn't as catchy a title, huh?

>The year the Americans broke the internet.

Yeah... you're welcome, I guess?

I suppose I should have called my representatives, right? Well, their interns, at least...

Anytime someone says something like, " and I don't want to add to the hyperbole already out there, but," I write them off.

That is an admittance to using hyperbole, and therefore invalidates the argument, correct?

It's up there with "I'm not a racist, but..."

Doesn't affect facts, though. Just means be more sceptical...

Or "I don't mean to be rude, but..."

For a while, the Something Awful forums apparently word-filtered "I'm not racist, but" to appear as "I'm extremely racist, and"

I heavily disagree that the internet is now forever broken as this writer is mentioning. One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another. The whole notion of being broken "For good" implies 'forever' and forever is a lot longer than the writer may realize.

People will know and figure out if ISPs are in fact abusing their powers. Yes, I agree that all ISPs are evil in their own way and there is nothing we can do about that. Although, I think that the ISPs know that they are making more money off of their users than they would throttling other sites thus retaining those users is of the utmost importance.

> One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another.

Or even the same year; the FCC is already moving to restore (and perhaps expand by voiding barriers to municipal broadband) the substance of the ruels in its Open Internet Order, under different legal authority, based on the decision in the Verizon case. [1]

[1] http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-fcc-chairman-tom-wheel...

> It is much more than that. As the LA Times said in the aftermath of the US Appeals court decision that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could not establish rules promoting net neutrality: bow down to your new internet overlords, Comcast and Verizon.

I'm hoping Google will lead the way and provide a genuine alternative for retail Internet access, given the extent of their parallel network. Comcast and Verizon will then have an opportunity to learn that customers are people to be served and not cows to be milked.

Why would Google's alternative be neutral when there is no rule saying it has to be?

That's a good point. In terms of an ideal solution, the answer would definitely be "no." In terms of the behavior of the companies involved, I trust Google slightly more than I do Verizon or Comcast to keep the interests of consumers in mind. But trusting a for-profit corporation with something like this is not an ideal long-term arrangement.

Not 2014. It was 2001.

When Americans broke theirselves, because of being unable to make anything but guns. And war.

They (You?) broke their own freedom, because of guns, and making money in wars.

Try something else, something new.

as much of a pessimist as I am, I highly doubt much of the doomsday scenario will come to pass. Comcast and Verizon will likely spend a lot of time and energy staying JUST on this side of the FCC's ire, because the FCC will always have the "nuclear option" of reclassifying the ISPs as common carriers.

Besides, ISPs degrade/prioritize traffic all the time through management of peering relationships. All they have to do is fail to adequately upgrade the servers that communicate with Netflix to cause congestion while at the same time spending lots of resources making sure their peering relationship with Hulu is top-notch. This would create much faster Hulu traffic relative to Netflix traffic on provider's network, but all of the traffic is still reaching the end-user in the same manner, i.e. it's still "net-neutral".

The only real solution here is the common carrier reclassification because the only real problem is the last-mile-monopoly. Everything else is just business.

I'd just like to point out, this also gives an opportunity (or at least incentive) for different forms of internet transport (i.e. googles loon).

I'd surmise that forcing the FCC's hand on a common carrier ruling might be preemptive to loon or another mesh-networking based co. gaining ground in a regulatorally permissive space. Especially given longer range wifi tech is on the horizon.

More like US Appeals Court broke internet

Hey, it was ours to break.

lol, yeah, everything is american, i forgot...

Stuff created by our defense department in conjunction with our universities certainly is American. To this day, ICANN operates under authority delegated from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

By that same logic, all websites are European (Swiss? French? German?) because HTTP was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN.

Just keep those websites off my lawn

Then we Danes would like our ice cube bags back, please.

Fine. But keep the Legos coming or there will be hell to pay.

Well, in this case it is. lol.

Americans giveth and Americans taketh away.

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